This invention relates to the field of Internet technologies and, more particularly, to the controlling and monitoring of video and/or audio conferencing through the Internet.
In the last several years, the World Wide Web, or the Internet, has been blended with a variety of other technologies to create new, innovative, and globally accessible applications. Such blended technologies include on-line airline reservation systems, weather monitoring systems, catalog purchasing, stock trading, as well as many others. An example of such a blended technology developed by Accord Telecommunications Ltd., now Polycom Israel Ltd., the assignee of the present invention, monitors and controls a video conference through the use of a website interface.
Utilizing existing technology to establish a video conference, a service provider is enlisted to reserve, set up, monitor and control the video conference. In this configuration, an operator must either attend the conference, monitor the conference, or at least be in contact via telephone, or some other means, with one of the participants of the video conference. The role of the operator is to monitor the video conference and resolve any problems that may arise. In addition, the operator can control various aspects of the video conference, such as, muting, video configurations, entrance and exits to the video conference, or the like. For example, if one of the participants in a video conference wants to mute another participant in the video conference, the initiating participant must notify the operator. The operator then mutes the other participant and provides an indicator to the other participants of such. Simple control over a video conference such as this requires the presence and attention of the operator.
The use of an operator within a video conference results in increasing the cost for video conferencing services. For each active video conference, sufficient operator support must be available. If a single operator is required to control multiple video conferences, the quality of service may suffer during busy or peak operational times. If a separate operator is assigned to each video conference to ensure a high-quality of performance, the cost of the video conferencing service may escalate.
In addition, in state of the art video conferencing technologies, the participants in a video conference may not be automatically made aware of the status of the video conference. For example, a participant may not know if another participant is joining into the conference or if a participant has muted himself via his or her terminal. In the current art video conferencing technologies, only the operator has access to such information. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method to allow individual participants in a video conference to obtain status information pertaining to the video conference and the other participants in the video conference. It is desirable to provide a solution which allows the individual participants in a video conference to control and/or obtain status information without requiring the intervention of an operator. The solution presented in the present invention is to utilize an Internet based monitoring and control system to replace some or all of the functions of the operator. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and a method to blend video conferencing technology with Internet or network technology.
Often times, when blending existing technologies, short comings or incompatibilities arise that require innovative engineering to overcome. The use of a networked based monitoring and control system for video conferences encounters such incompatibilities. The most apparent incompatibility in the video conferencing example arises based on the need for continuously providing updated information to the participants of a video conference. The status information pertaining to a video conference can change rapidly and often. Obtaining and tracking this status information in real-time can be processor intensive. Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method that can receive and rapidly process the status information available during a video conference.
Internet technologies were not developed for the purpose of providing and rapidly updating information. Rather, the Internet was designed to extract vast amounts of generally static information. Nonetheless, several attempts have been made to utilize the Internet in a manner to support monitoring or receiving information that is periodically updated, or more succinctly stated, to provide updateable web pages.
The most rudimentary technique to provide updateable web pages is the refresh function. Typically, state of the art web browsers are equipped with a function or button which, when invoked, will cause the browser to reload updated information from a displayed website. This process involves reloading the data from a web server without having any prior knowledge as to whether the data has changed or not. This technique is inadequate for many applications because it requires the viewer of the website to continuously invoke the refresh function to obtain updated information. If no new information is available, time and bandwidth are needlessly expended.
Another technique to provide updateable web pages is to automatically invoke the refresh function. This technique eliminates the requirement for the viewer to manually and continuously invoke the refresh button; however, similar to the previous technique, this automated technique is inadequate in that it wastes a significant amount of time and bandwidth. The refresh function is invoked blindly, because the viewer does not know if updated information is available or not. Thus, the refresh function may be invoked multiple times without providing any updated information. Therefore there is a need in the art for a system and a method to provide updated information in an Internet environment that minimizes the waste of time and bandwidth by only providing information when it has actually been updated or modified.
Another advanced technique for providing updateable web pages is to include a Java applet on the viewer""s page. An applet invokes processing on the viewer""s computer system. In operation, the applet opens a TCP/IP socket to the server in order to send and receive data from the server. Upon receiving the information from the server, the applet updates the web page with the new information. This technique for providing updateable web pages has several disadvantages. One such disadvantage is that this technique requires the opening of an additional TCP port on the firewall of the service provider. This opens the server to additional security risks. Another disadvantage is that large applets that include a significant amount of code take a substantial amount of time to load on the viewer""s computer system. In addition, in some sites the browser does not support Java applets. Yet another disadvantage of this technique is that when transferring data using TCP/IP, the serialization and the de-serialization of the data has to be programmed (unless the server was written in Java). For instance, if the data received is a long string with delimiters, to parse the data and extract necessary information, code must be written to perform the task. However, the structure of the data would be known to a Java script.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a system and method to provide updateable web pages that are not limited to the use of Java applets. There is also a need in the art for such a system to be compatible with a variety of web page types and to quickly update.
Therefore, it is clear that there is a need in the art for a system and method to provide updateable web pages that reduce or eliminate above-described problems. There is also a need in the art for such a system and method that can be used for monitoring and controlling a video conference without the need for operator intervention.
Therefore, it is clear that there is a need in the art for a system and a method of monitoring video and/or audio conferencing through a rapid-update website.
The present invention includes a system and a method for updating a web page with rapidly changing information. Utilizing embodiments of the present invention, information can be updated with a delay of less than 500 ms. Although the present invention will be described within the context of monitoring and controlling a video conference through a website, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the present invention can be utilized within a variety of environments and is most beneficial in monitoring and controlling applications having fast changing data
In general, the present invention satisfies the aforementioned needs in the art by providing a system and method to monitor and control a multi-participant video/audio conference using the web, and to rapidly update information on a web page to provide current status information to the participants of the conference. Conference scheduling and reservation via an Internet based web server instead of using an operator has been described in a separate provisional patent application titled xe2x80x9cA System and Method for Providing Reservationless Conferencingxe2x80x9d filed in the United States Patent Office on Mar. 1, 2000 by Accord Networks Ltd., and being assigned Ser. No. 60/186,002. Using the present invention, a participant can view the status of a video-conference on-line and control the operation of the video conference in semi-real time without contacting an operator.
One embodiment of the present invention includes a system for providing a semi real-time, automatically-updateable web page. The system includes a web server and a client computer device having a display. A server script runs in a continuous loop on the web server, receives data or status information from a data information source and generates a client script based, at least in part, on the data information. In one embodiment, the data is received from the information source by placing a call to a Microsoft Component Object Model (xe2x80x9cCOMxe2x80x9d) application running within the web server. The COM application interfaces to an external device and obtains the data or status information. If new data information is obtained from the COM application, the web server will create or modify the client script. The web server then downloads the client script to the client computer device.
The client computer device includes a web browser. The web browser enables the client computer device to interface with the web server through a network, such as the Internet, an intranet or any of a variety of networks. The web browser receives a Universal Resource Locator (xe2x80x9cURLxe2x80x9d) that corresponds to a split web page to be downloaded from the web server. The split web page includes an invisible pane and a visible pane. The web browser receives the client script from the web server, into the invisible pane and executes the client script. One function of the client script is to update the visible pane, which is viewable on the display of the client computer device, with the data information received.
Another embodiment of the present invention includes a system for controlling the operation of a conference via a network. The conference is typically provisioned through a conference system controller or a Multipoint Control Unit (xe2x80x9cMCUxe2x80x9d). The system includes a web server and a client computer device. The web server includes a conference system controller interface to provide control information to the conference system controller and a network interface, typically to the Internet. The client computer device, which can be any computing device that includes a display, is communicatively coupled to the web server through the network interface. A web browser runs on the client computer device and is operative to receive a monitoring web page from the web server. The monitoring web page defines at least one control element which can be selected and/or actuated. When the control element is actuated, the web browser requests the web server to send a related control action to the conference system controller over the conference system controller interface.
In another embodiment, the web server includes a COM application and the web browser requests the web server to send a control action to the conference system controller by requesting the download of a command Microsoft""s Active Server Pages (xe2x80x9cASPxe2x80x9d) page from the web server. The command ASP page includes a server script with a call to the COM application. Once the call to the COM application is placed, the COM application interfaces to the conference system controller over the conference system controller interface and performs the control action. The control action can include actions such as muting a participant, changing the display layout of a video conference, changing the zoom or pan of a participants camera, dropping a participant from the conference, or the like.
Thus, it will be seen by examining the figures, the detailed description associated with each figure, and the claims, that the present invention provides a useful, novel and non-obvious method for updating a web page with rapidly changing data and providing an Internet based solution for monitoring and controlling a video/audio conference.